SLALOM

The SLALOM benchmark has been described by Dr. Gustafson as follows

"Measuring performance over a fixed amount of time, instead of
for a fixed-size task, had proved to be a good idea. But all
the technical computing benchmarks did things the old way...
testing time reduction for a given problem. So with the
help of a newly-minted ace post-doc, Diane Rover, we devised
the first scientific benchmark to ask how much work you can
get done in a given amount of time... in this case, one minute.
The parallel processor vendors were hungry for something
like this, so it wasn't long before we had over a hundred
widely-varied computer architectures on our list. (In contrast, the
NAS Parallel Benchmarks took several years to get six systems
on their list.)

"SLALOM netted our fledgling lab its first R&D 100 award and
put it on the map. The magazine Supercomputing Review started
printing SLALOM performance results as a regular feature."

A number of publications were generated as a result of the SLALOM
work: